An anonymous reader writes “The default desktop within Debian 7.0 ‘Wheezy’ has changed from GNOME to Xfce. GNOME, KDE, & LXDE will continue to be available, yet the decision was made to default to Xfce. The reported reasoning comes down to size constraints in fitting GNOME on a single CD.”

An anonymous reader writes: Today Microsoft announced the latest device in their line of Windows tablets: the Surface 3. The tablet runs a full version of Windows (the troublesome “RT” line has been deprecated), & aims to compete with Apple’s iPad. The Surface 3 has a 10.8″ screen running at 1920×1280 (note the 3:2 ratio).[…]

wiredmikey writes: A massive power outage caused chaos & shut down public transport across Turkey on Tuesday, with the government refusing to rule out that the electricity system had been the victim of an attack. The nationwide power cut, the worst in 15 years, began shortly after 10:30 am (0730 GMT) in Istanbul, the state-run[…]

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The Guardian: Amazon is testing its drone delivery service at a secret site in Canada, following repeated warnings by the e-commerce giant that it would go outside the U.S. to bypass what it sees as the U.S. federal government’s lethargic approach to the new technology. The largest internet[…]

Today Mozilla began rolling out Firefox version 37.0 to release channel users. This update mostly focuses on behind-the-scenes changes. Security improvements include opportunistic encryption where servers support it & improved protection against site impersonation. They moreover disabled insecure TLS version fallback & added a security panel within the developer tools. One of the things end[…]

New submitter recaptcha writes Today one of my fellow workers has announced he has found another job & will be leaving our company in two weeks’ time. This is all above board & there is no disgruntled employee scenario here; he is simply working through his notice period & finishing up some jobs. I have[…]

Michael Ross writes As with any content management system, building a website using Drupal typically requires extensive use of its administrative interface, as one navigates through its menus, fills out its forms, & reads the admin pages & notifications — or barely skims them, as they have likely been seen by the site builder countless[…]

donniebaseball23 writes While the term ‘Xbox’ is firmly implanted in every gamer’s mind today, when Microsoft first set out to launch a console in 2001, people weren’t sure what to expect & Microsoft clearly wasn’t sure what approach to take to the market. As Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley explained, “In the early days of Xbox,[…]

jones_supa writes Luke Hodorowicz, the hard-working developer behind the townbuilding strategy computer game Banished, has designed a novel GPU shading language & written a compiler for it. The language has been christened ‘Shining Rock Shading Language’ (SRSL) & it outputs the program in several other shading languages. The first goal for the language was to[…]

HughPickens.com writes According to an op-ed by Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post, if Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country’s education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills, expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering & math) & deemphasize the humanities. “It is the[…]